An Introduction to Antennas

The IEEE has created an alliance with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois and Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Urbana, IL, to offer a web-delivered course on antennas and propagation.

This four-week course, designed to serve as a refresher for practicing engineers, will be based entirely on the Internet. Classes run from 1 April, 1999 through 30 April. Registration ends 31 March 1999. Course capacity is limited to 30 students.

The course will provide learners with an analytical and intuitive understanding of antenna physics, expose them to antenna computer-aided design software, and introduce them to a variety of antenna structures of practical interest. The course will also cover recent developments in the wireless and personal communication systems. Those intending to register are expected to have a basic knowledge of electromagnetic wave theory outlining the general plane wave solution of Maxwell's equations, phenomena involving reflection and transmission of plane waves, transmission lines, and impedance matching techniques.

Students who successfully complete the course will be awarded 3.6 IEEE Continuing Education Units (CEUs).

For more information about the course contents and requirements contact Eric Michielssen.

From this course, you will learn about:

• Antenna fundamentals and parameters: Electromagnetic fundamentals, solution of Maxwell's equations, ideal dipole, radiation pattern, directivity and gain, reciprocity - measurements, antenna impedance and radiation efficiency, antenna polarization, receiving antennas.

• Basic antenna types: small dipoles, half wave dipoles, image theory, monopoles, small loop antennas. Antenna arrays: array factor, uniformly excited equally spaced arrays, pattern multiplication principles, nonuniformly excited arrays, phased arrays.

• Line sources and wire antennas: uniform and tapered line sources, dipoles and folded dipoles, Yagi-Uda Antennas.

• Broadband Antennas: helical, biconical spiral and Log-periodic antennas.

  Aperture radiation: horn and reflector antennas.

To participate in the course, students are required to possess the following hardware and software capabilities:

• Hardware requirements: a Pentium PC or Unix Workstation (PC access is preferred); Internet access;

• Software requirements: Windows 95 or NT; Netscape Communicator 4.0 or Microsoft Explorer 4.0; Adobe PDF reader; Microsoft PowerPoint 97; VRWEB (A Vrml viewer available at http://www.iicm.edu/vrweb); Software optional (but recommended): Mathematica

About the instructor:

Eric Michielssen received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992. He is an assistant professor in the UIUC Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, associate director for the Center of Computational Electromagnetics, and a part-time faculty member in the Beckman Institute Photonic Systems Group. His professional interests are computational electromagnetics, photonic systems, high-speed digital circuits, fast algorithms, and stochastic optimization.

Honors and awards: NSF CAREER Award (1995); List of Instructors Named as Excellent by Their Students, UIUC (1991, 1993); Belgian American Educational Foundation Fellow (1988).

1999

List Price $400, Member Price $350

Order No. EW100-QIA

REGISTER HERE